Author: lauralovejune

by Laura Syvaniemi

The Boutierre Girls studio in Epping. Image: Laura Syvaniemi

A fresh-faced Emily Michele Smith meets me at the gate to her studio. I’ve walked the twenty minutes from Epping station despite Emily’s offer to pick me up, admiring the stillness of the residential area just forty minutes away from bustling Sydney centre. On my way I see roses everywhere; perhaps it is my interviewee who has inspired me to notice them. 26-year-old Emily runs Boutierre Girls, an Instagram sensation and one of Sydney’s most prestigious floral businesses.

It’s 10 am and Emily has already had four shots of coffee. She has apologetically rescheduled three times; her black van full of flowers is relentlessly on the move, catering to last minute orders. This week alone, she has also received three other requests for interviews.

The Boutierre Girls studio is a crisp white space that sets the scene for many of Emily’s Instagram photos. It’s the social media platform that sparked her rise to floral fame and features frequently in her speech when talking about Boutierre Girls. Emily has nearly 35 000 followers, a figure that is steadily rising.

Emily in her studio. Image: Laura Syvaniemi

The walls of the studio are covered with urns and vases, some filled with blooms left over from the morning’s deliveries. Emily is apologetic there aren’t more and automatically rearranges them, unasked, for a better photograph. We sit down at a grey concrete table where she fiddles with a massive nude Mayfair rose, gently peeling back its petals as she talks.

”I got up at 3.45,” She says as I ask her about her morning. ”I’ve been to the markets, bought all my flowers, come back and stripped everything down, made all my deliveries and delivered them. I’ve delivered flowers for a photo shoot as well. That’s about it.”

The early alarm is no stranger to Emily: she always gets up that time on Mondays and Wednesdays, when fresh flowers come into the flower markets. On Fridays it’s ”around 2.30”. Emily works seven days a week – the amount of coffee quickly makes sense.

The birth of Boutierre

Before Boutierre Girls Emily studied medical science at UNSW, spending her spare time making cakes and playing with flowers.

”I have chronic fatigue and was sort of bed-ridden for three or four years,” Emily explains. ”I would have weird hobbies and flowers was one of them. I started as cakes, and then I was like; I actually hate cakes.” She laughs. ”And the reason my cakes were so popular was I’d deck them out with fresh flowers. So I just got rid of cakes and did flowers instead.”

A florist, just like her first cake client, found Emily on Instagram and offered her a job. After two months, in 2014, she quit and started her own business. ”It’s been going nuts ever since!”

“Pictures on Instagram that get a lot of likes tend to be just one flower,” Emily says of her most reposted images. Images courtesy of Boutierre Girls.

Due to her explosive rise in popularity, Emily had to leave UNSW and a brief period at TAFE. She now creates florals for weddings, as well as fashion labels and photoshoots, which she loves. Recently she had her first magazine cover.

”I’d love to move overseas and do stuff with big labels,” Emily says. ”If I ever did a job for like Balmain, I’d probably die. I still scream like a little kid when I get a job offer from a label that I’m obsessed with.”

Hard labour

The hours behind Boutierre Girls’ famed florals are hard work. When asked if people understand the amount of labour that goes into flowers, Emily laughs out loud. ”No! No way. Yeah, no chance.”

What might seem like a simple bouquet order means Emily has gotten up and gone to the markets, paid ten dollars for parking, bought the flowers, driven back to her studio, stripped the flowers, arranged the bouquet and then delivered it. ”That’s half a day’s work,” she explains.

And compared to big events, half a day for a bouquet sounds like child’s play. ”If you’ve got a huge job on Sunday, you pretty much don’t sleep from when you pick up the flowers on Friday through till Sunday. You just don’t have enough hours in the day.”

Go big or go home

Two phones on the tabletop beep with the occasional incoming message, which Emily checks in stride. She talks about the physical demands of the job: the rigging, knotting, public liability and fork lifts – ”They’re really hard to drive!” – that come with the floral installations she creates.

Bigger, faster, harder, better. I ask Emily if she ever feels out of her depth.

She laughs. ”I’ll book a job and be like ’I have no idea how to do that, but sure!’. By the time it comes around it’s so easy. I find that with pretty much all of the florists: most of us have no idea what we’re doing when it comes to designing big crazy things on roofs and stuff. You just do whatever works and make sure it doesn’t fall.”

Emily loves working with anthereums and roses (left). A recent wedding at Sydney venue Mr. Wong (middle) has been one of her favourites so far. Images courtesy of Boutierre Girls.

As the artist behind installations such as Samantha Wills’ stunning floral walls, the first of which Emily still recalls as ”her baby”, it’s safe to say clients are in good hands. She loves using roses, anthereums and orchids – all of which feature abundantly in her work and Instagram account – but has a hard time picking her favourite jobs.

”Every second wedding I’ll be like ”this is my favourite wedding ever!” because I love whatever I’m doing at that time,” She says. ”Whatever flower I’m working with is my favourite flower.”

Flower friends

Weddings, from which Boutierre Girls currently gets most of their work, are notoriously tricky to execute.

”My worst nightmare would be for a bride to be disappointed on her wedding day,” She says of the high pressure jobs.

”No matter how organised I am, in every wedding something goes wrong. Things just happen on the day that you don’t expect. But the bride will never know and you just learn to recover in, like, five seconds. I’m really good under pressure and every single time it works out. Every single time we manage to get it done.”

From traffic jams to sudden heat waves to brides having given her the wrong date for their wedding, the Boutierre peeps have been there. When going gets rough Emily enlists the help of fellow florists, many of whom she is close with.

”We’re all pretty good friends. Even overseas, we’re all pretty tight through Instagram. I can stay anywhere and know that I’ll be able to find a flower friend and be like; I’m coming over!”

It’s the love of flowers that unites them and makes the long, sleep-deprived hours worthwhile.

”I just love flowers. I always have,” Emily states simply. ”I love it. There’s always work stuff about it, but I’m lucky that I can earn a full-time salary doing this. I see people in offices and I could never do that. I just don’t know how they do it. I literally don’t know.”

For my online profile feature piece I would like to give the reader a glimpse into the world of creative floral design and shine a light on the person behind the blooms. Through an interview with one of Sydney’s talented wedding and event florists, I would like to share the story of one woman’s love for creation, the struggles and triumphs of creative entrepreneurship and how the seemingly simple process of flower arranging is actually behind the scenes a form of art.

Few people realise the amount of work and love that goes into creating high end floral design. Behind the immaculate arrangements is so much more. Hours of administration work, 4 AM mornings at the flower markets, literal blood, sweat and tears in the design studio, hands stripped raw and bleary-eyed all-nighters to pull off floral event designs ranging from small and delicate to statement en masse. Florists work with what may well be the most delicate of all design materials: living things.

With lush greenery and statement floral installations heavily trending in weddings for 2016 and 2017, creative florists are the new event design superstars. They are romantically portrayed in fine art wedding publications; forest-foraging, carelessly luxe, slow living and Kinfolk-toting descendants of Mother Earth. However the reality behind the business of florals is far less glamorous – or is it?

I am reaching out to a few of Sydney’s most renowned floral designers, such as Emily Michele Smith of Boutierre Girls who is my personal industry idol and who has created an immensely successful floral business in only two years. Other options for interviewees might be Sydney-based florists Jardine Botanic or My Violet, both creators of a similar organic and artistic style.

As it is wedding season – and it’s always season for those in most demand – and spare time is scarce, it’s possible that another angle and type of interviewee may be needed to switch to. In this case I could contact less renowned florists and hear the story of their budding (no pun intended!) dream.

As this feature is a profile, it is highly subjective and only briefly touches upon wider, mainly wedding, event and floral industry-related contexts and topics. It works as a human interest piece as well as an insight into a niche, aimed mainly at the industry but possibly interesting to a far larger audience – especially that of brides planning their weddings. Online delivery would preferrably be aided by strong use of visuals, if possible photographs of the interior of a floral studio as well as the artist at work.

An online publication suitable for this profile piece would be wedding blog Hello May, which is read by brides and industry creatives alike and which also publishes a print counterpart.

This piece posted by Tetyana Lokot on GlobalVoices.org as part of RuNet Echo, attempts an easily scannable and visually broken down style of delivery but loses its message amidst its Twitter screenshots.

Lokot breaks down her news post by screencapping tweets from a wide array of different sources, some verified Twitter accounts but most not. Hyperlinks to give context and authority to these sources would have made for more informative, engaging and trustworthy reading (Rohumaa & Bradshaw, 2011, p. 38).

Text boxes containing translations of the Russian tweets are necessary, however their visual delivery is cramped and out of proportion. The amount of boxes and visuals overwhelms the piece itself, reducing it to a commentary without a strong common thread. The piece could also do with some subheading to break down its different themes and sections for comprehensive reading and multiple entry points into the text (Rohumaa & Bradshaw, 2011, p. 37).

Social media sharing icons and choices to engage with the article and writer are provided and hyperlinks are provided well throughout the piece, except for the repetitive links to the Twitter hashtag #panamapapers where one would be sufficient.

Word count: 190

Reference:

Rohumaa, L., & Bradshaw, P. (2011). Writing for the web. In Online Journalism Handbook: Skills to survive and thrive in the digital age (pp. 29-46). Routledge.

Six people lost their lives and another 18 were treated for minor injuries as Cyclone Victor hit Honiara yesterday. Over 100 people were left homeless as more than 20 houses were destroyed.

The cyclone was detected at 2 am as it developed rapidly near Nauru and moved towards the Solomon Islands. The government was warned an hour later and emergency plans were immediately launched. By 10 am winds were blowing at more than 140 kilometres per hour in Honiara.

Three men drowned when their car was blown off the road into a river, while two women and a man were struck dead by flying debris. Over 20 houses were destroyed and numerous other buildings were considerably damaged.

Mopping-up operations have started in Honiara, which is believed to have been the worst affected. Emergency services are still waiting for news from other districts.